Hi guys! I was just thinking that a really helpful article to write would be on "Things I Wish I Hadn't Done When I Built My Home Theater". You know, mistakes you made with wiring / purchasing / lighting / not wiring / not purchasing / not lighting . . . that sort of thing. Knowing a lot of you have really beautiful and intricate installations, I figure you may have all kinds of helpful advice. Any you care to share?

Thank you in advance!

Oh - and of course, it's perfectly fine to say a friend made the mistake in their home theater ;-)

Buy more cable than you think you need. Those bends and turns add up quickly.

Don't buy all of the wall plates until just before you are ready to install them. You never know when your final configuration is going to change and you end up with odd plates/jacks.

Never assume that anything is squarely built in your theater, whether before you started, or after.

If you have an entirely enclosed room, don't forget the HVAC coming into the room, but just as important, don't forget some way for the air to get out of the room. Enclosed spaces warm up quickly even if you try to cram more A/C in if the hot air has no place to go.

Use flexible ductwork and several bends to prevent sounds from traveling through the entire house.

Soundproofing techniques don't have to be complicated, have many different options, and just require the correct application techniques to be successful.

Any room can benefit from acoustical treatments.

Use a good carpet and thick pad for your floor covering if at all possible. You might be surprised how many people sit on the floor.

Silicon caulk seals up seams wonderfully for air-tightness (yes I made that word up), but nothing wants to stick (paint, mud, primer, etc) to silicon caulk.

An extra set of hands can really be helpful sometimes.

An extra set of hands can really slow you down sometimes.

Take lots of pictures, not only to post online, but so that you can document what you did, where the wires run, and so forth.

No matter how hard you try, sometimes your camera will just screw up the colors and thus the look/feel of the room.

**If you have an entirely enclosed room, don't forget the HVAC coming into the room, but just as important, don't forget some way for the air to get out of the room. Enclosed spaces warm up quickly even if you try to cram more A/C in if the hot air has no place to go.

**Soundproofing {edit: sound dampening/controlling} techniques don't have to be complicated, have many different options

**Use a good carpet and thick pad for your floor covering if at all possible. You might be surprised how many people sit on the floor.

**Take lots of pictures, not only to post online, but so that you can document what you did, where the wires run, and so forth.

I'm onboard with those bulleted from Nick's list above.

Trying to plan ahead can be tough. We originally figured on a single seating location in our room for use with a projector and screen. By the time we were done the room reno, we had it wired for two seating configurations, for 7.1 in both directions, and 6 years later we have not bought a projector, nor are we planning to do so any more.

Some of the behind wall 'tunnels' were located to accommodate the fact that a projector screen would have hidden any wires coming down from the ceiling. Now having changed the plan to just buy a large flat screen (70" + plasma or OLED depending on how fast it comes about), running new wires through our tunnels would be fairly visible unless we came up with a post-construction design for cable management along a wall (eeech).

Aside from that, measure, measure and measure.Follow that up with building mock items (out of cardboard boxes works well), placing them around the room because sometimes even measurements (of furniture for example) and Google Sketch type drawing don't quite show you how tight things fit into a room.e.g. Our 1st seating location faces into the long part of the room BUT, in this configuration we don't have enough space on the side of our loungers for side tables.In our 2nd and present seating location, sidetables work, BUT, distance the speakers decreases and the sound sweet spot is right where the two lounge arms bump together.{sigh}

One thing is for sure, our HT cannot take speakers larger than the M60s and actually make a reasonable stereo effect. Coupled with the centre channel we have a pretty good soundstage, but not completely optimal.But i'm not changing out the M60s for anything smaller, not anytime soon.

_________________________"Those who preach the myths of audio are ignorant of truth."

last year (or 2 years ago, can't remember!) i bought a sub which is good enough to play well anything i have fed it so far, even WOTW at Reference Level while tuned to 11 Hz.

a few days ago, i bought Cameron Carpenter's Revolutionary CD/SACD on Telarc.the frequencies below 20 Hz are so strong that my sub overloads when the sub's tuning is at 11/12 Hz.so, i will retune the sub to 16 Hz and see how it behaves.

not being able to play this CD with my sub tuned to 11-12 Hz is having a negative impact on my smile...

i should have taken the adjacent room into consideration when i selected a sub; this room is connected to the AV room by a door space and it effectively doubles the room size.

one solution would be for me to install a solid door in the empty space to make the room effectively 1300 cu ft. and not 3000 cu. ft.

Nice catch Chess on the "Soundproofing". I used that term just to make it more "newbie" friendly, but you are right on the mark. I can't imagine the cost of a fully "soundproof" room. The sound coming outside of my room is *significantly* quieter than inside the room, but you can still hear it of course. Those LFE sounds are very difficult to stop. I am still glad that I spent the time and money to do what I did. For about $1000 more (plus a LOT of elbow grease), it was a huge improvement over anything else I've ever done.